16 December 2011

[web_design] Google Chrome … Winning the War

2728.Remember those days when they said The browser wars were over, and MSIE had won?

Remember?

Yeah, those were good times. Then MS went complacent, stopped developing Internet Exploder, and pretty soon, Mozilla and Firefox were, at first nibbling at, then eating up, its lunch. It left the Mac market to all the other browsers too, so us Mac users had to find something else.

Then IE begat tabs … years after FF made them first fashionable, then de rigueur, then freakin' indispensable.

Then Google, at last, came along, and put Chrome on the thing. By that time, being a Mac user, I'd made Firefox pretty much the most important app on my machine, no matter what else I was doing. And I was a hard sell on Chrome … I was very dependent on Firefox extensions such as ScribeFire for blog posting and other things. If there was a way for the Web to be made easier and more intuitive, the Fox had it.

I liked Chrome at first, but not enough to switch. Then ScribeFire came to Chrome and I started using it. that got me over. Since then I've moved away from using a blog-posting app as the cloud-interface - the Blogger interface - gives me all the functionality I need, and then some.

No offense, ScribeFire. It's not you; it's me. Well, it was you, just a little bit, but no harm - no foul, eh?

That's not to say Chrome is perfect; the number of Web Workers, Renderers and null processes it spawns never fail to make me raise an eyebrow. And, once in a while, the browser crashes on startup – a quick reinstall usually fixes this problem. But I like Chrome a lot.

So, when I found out that Chrome had passed IE8 in popularity, I was surprised only that it happened so quickly – never underestimate an installed base, someone once said to me. Browsers, I guess, obey somewhat different laws of physics.

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This Here Blogger

Graphic designer, writer, editor. Worker in the Big Machine; the quintessential working-class native Oregonian, I drive some of the grimier gears so the Big Cats and Kittens don't have to. Am in the process of reinventing myself as the artist I always ought to have been. My blog is The ZehnKatzen Times.

This sentence, courtesy of commenter "JD", will help you remember the initials in order:All Across Portland Our Streets Wind Around Mossy Yards. Traffic Snarls May Mean Jammed Cars, Cranky Motorists Making Minimal Headway. Harried Commuters Just Love Going Slow.

Commenter Dave DiNucci, using enough of the letters from each word to eliminate ambiguity, gives us the following two possiblilities: This first one plays on the fact that alphabetically-arranged streets going north from Burnside are named for Portland founders while those going south do not:ANcestors ASsociated Portland Oregon STreets With ALphabetic MORtals, Yet Toward SAlem, MAInly MADe JEjune, COLUmnar, CLiche MARked MIxtures. MONotones HARmonize HALfway, COLLiding JAuntily. Lines Gently SHim.

This second one is more poetic but less PDX-centered, but works the Gorge in, as well as Lincoln, Grant, and Sheridan: